The video highlights the main points of how to optimize AdWords campaigns.

As we all know, paying the minimum we possibly can for advertising means more profit. It also means AdWords becomes profitable sooner! While an unoptimized AdWords campaign might be unprofitable, the opposite could be true for an optimized one!

The video highlights many important points of optimizing campaigns, the following really standing out:

It is not an in depth study, but it is made for anyone who would like to get to know the Adwords advertising program. Its a great watch for when you need to relax.

Basically, Adwords lets you advertise through Google search network, as well as content network and partner sites.

In contrast to SEO, which influences organic results, Adwords is a tool that helps you manipulate and manage pain advertising. The viability of paid advertising has probably been discussed to death. In short, it is viable for SOME products, but you really need to do your homework before embarking on a serious Adwords campaign. Thankfully for us, Google is well aware of that, so it has been distributing coupons for Adwords for some time. With it you get about 100$ for a 20$ investment (coupons vary by the funds you get). If you have some spending money, you might wanna test run Adwords at some point.

Experienced SEO specialists tend to outsource almost everything but the process and their methodology. From content writing, keyword research and content production, everything is made so the SEO officer can serve it up to the web in a way the web will accept. In small companies, the SEO will most likely be the leader of the team and will have limited knowledge of all the fields his coworkers are involved with. That is a result of how a SEO officer begins his career.

Beginner SEO specialists tend to be jacks of all trade. Writing content, producing content, websites, doing onsite and offsite SEO. They excel in no area but are improving their skills and once they feel up to it they will outsource much of their current work to focus on optimization. You can’t be great at everything can you?

SEO specialists in large companies are usually consultants to web designers, administrators. They take on an educative role and teach onsite optimization, as well as try to guide the administrators and designers up the white hat route. They may do offsite SEO or marketing.

SEO educators?

Many people decide to teach. I do not think that people who teach actually like the field they are experts at and prefer to mingle with people instead.

The other type is a teacher SEO. I think anyone who talks about something instead of doing it is doing something wrong…Those that can, do, those that can’t, teach.

Wait a minute…i am writing instead of working on my site…does that mean i…i have to go work, kthxbye, cya later!

Building keywords has been a concept used by many SEOs, me included. Since i prefer to find some traffic and just roll with it, instead of doing keyword research for days, i have found that this well established method will help me get more traffic. If you are an experienced SEO, you might want to skip this post.

So after finding a phrase with decent search volume i do the following research:

Lets say we want to optimize for a keyword like “eco butter”. Let us assume it has 25.000 searches per month and a hefty competition that battles for control over eco butter.

Now i know winning this battle will be hard and will take its time. So how can i get faster results? By optimizing for multiple keywords within one keyword!
By making a longer keyword (called a longtail keyword due to its length) we target a niche. By that we accomplish multiple goals:

Faster results- smaller traffic, but better than none

Passive promotion gained from traffic

Some revenue due to traffic

More traffic at the end of optimization of our main keyword (in our case eco butter)

How do i make a longtail keyword?

A common practice is to check the most well known keyword prefixes and suffixes:

Prefixes:

Cool, best, cheap, easy, top

Suffixes:

For sale, to buy, review

Lets continue our example…

Lets say we know that the longtail keyword cheap eco butter has 1000 monthly searches and low competition. We also know that the longtail keyword eco butter to buy has 2000 monthly searches and no competition.

By merging the main keyword with our prefix and our suffix we gain a long tail keyword like this:

Cheap eco butter to buy

This new keyword might or may not have its own search volume, if it does even better, if not, this keyword, although with no monthly searches is a dangerous opponent to the simple Eco butter used before.

Building keywords complete! Now what?

Well, once you have your onsite optimization completed, try to chase the longtails by optimizing them for the SERPS. Cheap eco butter, eco butter to buy and cheap eco butter to buy should be the focus of your promotion. All these optimizations also optimize and bring value to your main keyword, which at your age 99 will finally reach #1 on Google. Then you can pass that on to your grandchildren, which love gifts from their SEO grandpa!

Backlinks should be build to imitate a natural growth of a site. If we translate that into backlink structure, we can understand that monotonous and “too optimal” structures look unnatural.

Lets try to see that by looking at two examples:

Do you see something unusual about this chart? Is it harder to understand? Well it is because it is an obvious search engine manipulation (a bit extreme, but you get the point!). Having only PR5 sites, all dofollow is as unnatural as it gets and will turn on the red light with most search engines.

How should a proper backlink structure look like?

See the difference? You can actually see variety! Although you should decide how to structure the percentages of certain backlink (10% blog comments, 15% do-follow links etc) yourself. Just like in keyword density, there is no correct answer you can have about the percentages. But you can have a wrong answer: Anchor text over-optimization sprinkled with a bad backlink variety.

Keyword density is a part of the search engine algorithm. If you are trying to optimize a page for a specific keyword, not using it in any headers, text, titles will hurt your ranking for your keyword.

On the other hand, using a specific keyword too many times will also hurt your ranking with search engines. Keyword stuffing is/was a well known black hat SEO practice and is still in use today up to a point. I admit, i sometimes stuff keywords into a text after it has been written to get the desired effect. But you do need to make sure it fits in naturally and does not disturb the flow of the text you are optimizing. It might take a while, but if you are doing it (instead of your content creator), than do it right!

But keyword stuffing is basically a disproportional, unnatural percentage of keyword density, meaning you have used your keyword too many times or unnaturally.

But what is the optimum keyword density?

Well, most SEO specialists will say from 3-4 percent, although some even state 7%.

I agree with Matt Cutts on this issue, please do not tag me as a fanboy! I do not emphasize keyword density because of its diminishing returns to the search engine algorithm.

Lets see what MC has to say on the issue:

I do use my keywords in titles, headings, text. But i never go as far as checking the keyword density. I have written a ton of SEO posts and i think i gauge the numbers well enough. But keyword density is not as big of a factor for me as the backlink anchor text. If you ever heard of the saying that 20% of SEO is onsite, 80% is offsite, you may feel the same way. Although onsite is important, promotion is what gets you the traffic.

When in a rush i often just glance at the keyword search volume and estimate the competition via the intitle:”” method. It is by far not an accurate representation either, but it gets me the basic idea i need when deciding if i want to go for a keyword. If this method shows the keyword is unsuitable, you really do not need to look further into that keyword using any other tools.

Lets look at the most basic way choosing keywords for SEO:

The easiest way to estimate keyword value involves two tools, both free. One is a search engine, the other the free Adwords keyword tool provided by Google.

Follow these two easy steps to see if a keyword is worth looking into:

Use Adwords keyword tool to estimate the search volume of your keyword. Use the exact match option and statistic for the baseline. If there are no exact matches for that keyword, people are not using that keyword to find things online.

Use the intitle:”YOUR KEYWORD” in your browser search to find out how many sites have the same title as your keyword. Although a title is not by far the most important optimization indicator, pages with a title containing your keyword are the ones you need to be taking seriously.

Selecting keywords for SEO or keyword research as it is called is a process of determining the best phrases to use in order

to draw in desired traffic. It is a common on site SEO practice, but it is not always needed. Successful writers, bloggers are well known to despise SEO methods. And well they should, it may impede their creative flow. And quality content, even when not under SEO can be very powerful. I would personally rather promote great content than rehashed SEO content of poor quality.

Keywords are used to help search engines categorize your site and will lead to related traffic in turn. Related traffic is the highest quality traffic you can have, which will be interested in your content. In the past tricking visitors to your site was considered beneficial, now it is not only frowned upon, but due to the low average time spent on site may even be a negative statistic to your site. In any case, people not interested or deceived make poor customers and non productive visitors.

Let us look at some factors you should be aware of when choosing your keywords:

The purpose of your site Your site can have many roles. Common roles for sites are informational, much like this one and transactional sites, such as those looking to sell products or display ads (well ads are not transactions, i just put them in the same category for ease of understanding). There are other purposes to websites, try thinking a few and post your ideas in the comments!If you are running a site that is designed to sell things you may try selecting keywords for SEO that already imply an interest in a purchase.Lets take my site on Cheap bookcases for sale as an example.The prefix word cheap implies that a customer is in search of a cheap, in this case bookcase. In most cases people do not just do that for fun.The suffix phrase for sale serves pretty much the same purpose. It implies a search for a transaction in a greater degree than a word like cool, awesome, free etc..

If your site relies on traffic (such as informational sites and sites running ads) you should in effect choose keywords that draw in as many people as possible. The keywords you choose should have as high search volumes as you can get.

Desired traffic of your site. Traffic is great. Even poor quality traffic may increase revenue to a point. But choosing keywords for traffic is not just a matter of search volume, but also other factors, such as competition strength. Competition plays a large role in your SEO success stories. Areas such as weight loss, travel, internet marketing all sport some serious competition and if you are in search of a SEO battle, head into these areas. Treasures and pitfalls await!Since i like example i would like to point one out i just discussed yesterday. Someone made a page about cheap airline tickets. The search volume by using the free if somewhat inaccurate Adwords keyword tool is around 246.000 of exact searches for that keyword. If i had 10% of that traffic on all my websites i would be designing my own batcave at this point.Well all great so far. Now let us take a peek at the competition. 2.070.000 websites has the same keyword in its title. That means that you have that much exact search competition. If you reach the first 10 pages of that field, please do contact me and give me some tips on how to be a better SEO, since i have obviously been wasting my time. In short, the keyword is too heavily contested. Optimizing for it will only serve as a money sink and a waste of resources.Unless you get to the first few pages in the SERPs on that keyword, your investment will not pay off.

Budget. Budget limits our ambitions. Budget or time, if we are doing SEO ourselves. High competition fields require larger investments to reach higher positions in the search engines. Therefore, you will need to balance the desired traffic with the amount you can spend on it. Search engine optimization is just like advertising. You invest, you profit.If your are doing SEO yourself, picking up the crumbs by optimizing for micro niches might be in order. A micro niche is an area with low competition and some traffic.If you have spending money, you might want to invest more into making support sites, backlinks, content and promotion in the social media. A note though, support sites, backlinking is not white hat and may get you arrested. Just kidding. Deindexed.

I hope this short post helped you out, please comment on the factors you think are important when choosing keywords for SEO.

Funnily enough, we use natural link building and organic results in search engine terminology. But it has nothing to do with nature in the sense that you would be wearing a leaf on your crotch and built links.

Then what is natural link building?

Natural link building is link building that attempts to imitate a natural development of a link structure by imitating a natural rise of popularity in the SERPs by spacing out linking frequency and amount so it looks natural.

Why would we want to build links naturally?

Well, to start, building links itself is not very white hat, meaning it is not very liked by search engines companies who see it as manipulating their engines. To be frank, they are right. Building links is like building votes for your site and you are making those votes yourself. In a way you are faking the popularity of your page! But hey, everybody’s doing it!

How does natural link building look in practice?

Natural link building looks like this:

You keep the frequency of links consistent. It is important to note the dates when you added the links to make sure you do not add too many too fast.

Keep link amount low at the start. No new site ever gets 200 quality links on its day of coming online.

Keep link quality low at the start. You can not have a PR5 package of sites link to oyu from the start. Looks fishy!